Middle East crisis live: Israeli tanks push deeper into Rafah as Qatar PM warns ceasefire talks heading ‘backwards’

The Biden administration has assessed that Israel has amassed enough troops on the edge of Rafah to move forward with a full-scale incursion on the southern Gazan city over the coming days, CNN reported.

The two senior administration officials also told the outlet that US officials are unsure if Israel has made a final decision to carry out the full-scale invasion, which would be in defiance of Joe Biden’s warnings if it went ahead.

One of the officials also said that Israel has not made sufficient preparations – such as over food supplies, hygiene and shelter – ahead of its plans for evacuating Palestinians living in Rafah.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said Israel lacked a “credible plan” to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Rafah and warned an Israeli attack could create an insurgency by failing to kill all Hamas fighters in the southern Gaza city.

For the past week, the Israeli military has intensified bombardment and other operations in Rafah while ordering the population to evacuate from parts of the city, though residents say there is nowhere else safe left to go.

Fighting in Rafah has made it impossible for aid groups to access the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel. Officials estimate that as many as 500,000 people have already fled.

The US, which has provided crucial military and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Gaza, has expressed growing impatience with Israel, saying it won’t supply offensive arms for a full-scale Rafah assault.

Swiss police have reportedly removed about 50 pro-Palestinian student protesters who have been holed up in a Geneva university building for nearly a week.

About 20 officers entered the UniMail building in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a journalist from the Keystone-ATS news agency said.

“The police intervened around 4:50 this morning to evacuate the fifty people still present in the university. Most of the demonstrators were asleep. After being gathered, they were directed to the establishment’s underground parking lot.” Julie Zaugg, a journalist with LemanbleuTV channel, said on X.

She said they shouted pro-Palestinian slogans before being handcuffed and taken away in vans.

Geneva university officials had asked the protestors on Monday to vacate the premises and protest in a different manner.

University campuses around the world have been the stage of a growing number of protests by students, showing solidarity with Palestinains, who are demanding academic institutions divest from companies supplying arms to Israel.

The protests, which first spread across college campuses in the US, have reached universities in the UK, the rest of Europe, as well as Lebanon and India.

Here are the quotes from Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, about Israel’s offensive in Rafah reversing the progress in ceasefire talks.

He told the Qatar Economic Forum:

Especially in the past few weeks, we have seen some momentum building but unfortunately things didn’t move in the right direction and right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate.

Of course, what happened with Rafah has set us backward.

“There is no clarity how to stop the war from the Israeli side. I don’t think that they are considering this as an option … even when we are talking about the deal and leading to a potential ceasefire,” sheikh Mohammed added.

Israeli politicians were indicating “by their statements that they will remain there, they will continue the war. And there is no clarity on what Gaza will look like after this”, he said.

Talks over a ceasefire in Gaza have reached a stalemate because of Israel’s operation in Rafah, Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, has said at an economic forum in Doha.

Sheikh Mohammed, whose country has mediated heavily between Hamas and Israel in trying to bring about a truce, said Qatar will continue its role. We will hopefully be able to bring you some quotes from the Qatari prime minister shortly.

Officials estimate that as many as 500,000 people have fled Rafah since being told to evacuate by the IDF before their first attacks around and in the city a week ago.

The Israeli offensive in Rafah, which borders Egypt, has closed a main crossing point for aid, something humanitarian groups say has worsened an already dire situation. There is widespread concern about how many civilians will be killed in the invasion.

Recent, indirect talks in Cairo on a ceasefire and hostage release deal were unsuccessful, with both the Israeli and Hamas delegations leaving.

Izzat El-Risheq, a member of Hamas’ political office in Qatar, said the Hamas delegation had approved an Egyptian-Qatari proposal that included the release of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza and a number of Palestinians jailed by Israel.

Hamas has blamed Israel for the lack of agreement, and its Al-Aqsa TV’s Telegram account said the group would not make any concessions beyond those in the proposal it had accepted. Israel has said it is open to a truce, but has rejected demands for an end to the war.

Israeli forces have carried out at least eight strikes on humanitarian convoys and their facilities in Gaza since October, even after aid organisations provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

HRW said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not issue warnings to the aid organisations before the strikes, which killed or injured at least 31 people.

In one incident, on 1 April, seven aid workers were killed in drone strikes in the city of Deir al-Balah. Missiles hit a convoy of three World Central Kitchen vehicles, two marked with the organisation’s logo on the roof and all carrying civilians.

HRW said the convoy “was travelling a route that the organisation said they had agreed upon with the Israeli military”.

You can read the full story by my colleague, Lorenzo Tondo, here:

Israeli tanks pushed deeper into eastern Rafah on Tuesday morning, entering the neighbourhoods of al-Jneina, al-Salam and al-Brazil, residents said.

“The tanks advanced this morning west of Salahuddin road into the Brzail and Jneina neighbourhoods. They are in the streets inside the built-up area and there are clashes,” one resident told Reuters.

Officials estimate that as many as 500,000 people have fled Rafah since being told to evacuate by the Israel Defense Forces before their first attacks around and in the city a week ago.

The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of the eastern third of the city, which is packed with over a million Palestinian people taking refuge, according to estimates.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is the last stronghold of Hamas.

Al-Mawasi, in the “extended humanitarian zone” designated by Israel as a destination for those told to evacuate Rafah and elsewhere, has limited sanitation, minimal water supplies and inadequate food, displaced people there have said.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the crisis in the Middle East.

The Biden administration does not see it likely or possible that Israel will achieve “total victory” in defeating Hamas in Gaza, US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell has said.

While US officials have urged Israel to help devise a clear plan for the governance postwar Gaza, Campbell’s comments are the clearest to date from a top US official effectively admitting that Israel’s current military strategy won’t bring the result that it is aiming for.

“In some respects, we are struggling over what the theory of victory is,” Campbell said at a Nato youth summit in Miami on Monday. “Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of … a sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” he said.

“I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible and that this looks a lot like situations that we found ourselves in after 9/11, where, after civilian populations had been moved and lots of violence that … the insurrections continue.”

In other developments:

• Residents said Israeli tanks pushed further into Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, with tank shells landing at the centre of the city’s refugee camp and airstrikes destroying clusters of houses. Palestinian health officials said on Monday they had recovered at least 20 bodies of Palestinian people killed in overnight Israeli airstrikes on Jabaliya, while dozens of people were reported injured. Israeli forces fired on ambulances trying to reach injured people as air raids hit crowded residential areas within the sprawling refugee camp, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.

• In the far south of the devastated territory on Monday, witnesses reported helicopter strikes and street battles in Rafah as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) consolidated their hold on neighbourhoods east of the strategic Salah al-Din road, which bisects the city. An unknown number of people were killed in an airstrike on a house in the Brazil neighbourhood.

• Rafah residents received more evacuation orders through phone calls and text messages on Monday, causing more desperate people to start packing and leave, witnesses told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Up to 500,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah in the past week after Israeli warnings to evacuate before an imminent military assault. With the evacuation order and arrival of fighting, hospitals swiftly shut and meagre aid supplies vanished. Residents say they have no idea where they will go now, or how they will get there.

• The White House has condemned an attack on an aid convoy heading to Gaza by Israeli settlers who threw packages of food into the road and set fire to the vehicles. Video of the incident on Monday at Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, showed settlers blocking the trucks and throwing boxes of much-needed supplies on the ground.

• US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration does not view the killings of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel in the war as genocide. “We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House.

• At least 35,173 Palestinians have been killed and 79,061 injured by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since 7 October, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Reuters reported the new figures from a ministry statement on Tuesday. There have been 82 Palestinians killed and 234 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry statement added.

• A foreign UN security staff member was killed on Monday when a UN-marked vehicle travelling to a hospital in Rafah was struck – the first international UN fatality in the Gaza war, a UN spokesperson said, bringing the total death toll of UN personnel to about 190.